livebooks blog

Boston-based photographer Winslow Townson has over 25 years of experience photographing news, sports, features, and stories. His journalism background shines through in each of his images and this week we wanted to feature the fantastic job he’s done designing his website.

Check out what he had to say about what went into his site’s design and then head on over to www.winslowtownson.com to view the full thing!

Q: How would you describe the aesthetic of your website in three words?

WT: Clean, Vibrant, Easy

Q: How do you choose the photos that you display on your homepage?

WT: Since most of my work is sports related, I do a slideshow of sports pictures based mainly on the sports of the current season and the sports on the seasons that are coming up soon.

Q: How often do you update your website?

WT: I do my best to update my website’s “Recent Work” page after every assignment so that I keep it fresh and clients can see what I’ve done lately. I do a very tight edit of the images with usually just one or two selections from each job.

Q: What is your favorite feature that liveBooks offers?

WT: Definitely the editSuite. It is so easy to change images quickly, rearrange categories and change the homepage slideshow. That is one of the things that attracted me to liveBooks – it’s so user-friendly!

Q: What’s one piece of advice you’d offer to someone designing their website?

WT: Make it user-friendly. That can mean many things from simple navigation, readily available contact information, and quick loading images to tightly editing your images so that there are not too many in any one category. It’s frustrating when you can’t easily figure out how to navigate through pictures and through the site. I heard one editor of a national magazine say that if a site takes too long to load or he can’t figure out how to look at specific images quickly he will just close out the site. When he would stay with a website he would spend a few minutes maximum to get a feel for the photographer. So the user needs to get to where they want to be quickly and easily and not have an overwhelming amount of content. Having contact information readily available is obviously an aspect of being user-friendly. I put all my contact information at the bottom of every page.

Have a website you’d like us to feature? Email us at social@livebooks.com.

Atlanta/Chicago-based freelance photographer Steven Karl Metzer has a passion for portraiture and food and showcasing intimate images, incorporating environments and personalities into each shot. We particularly love the colorful, eye-catching, and easy flow of his website – which is why we are featuring it this week.

Check out what he had to say then head on over to www.stevenkarlmetzer.com.

Q: How would you describe the aesthetic of your website in three words?

SKM: Clean, Painless, Entertaining.

Q: How do you choose the images that are displayed on your homepage?

SKM: Well actually I struggled with that for awhile. I was putting up single images for my homepage but I felt that didn’t give the complete scope of my work in one page at one glance. I do all of my own updating, editing, and retouching, and the flow of imagery has always intrigued me and I have always loved laying out images. It’s a different way of thinking and it’s something that has always fascinated me. I take a lot of images with my phone and I actually love playing around with filters, so naturally I’m an Instagram junkie. I started with the idea of making a grid of iPhone images and I have always loved that look; I actually have printed portfolios from way back when with this imagery grid style for the cover. So I went back to that look and edited my strongest Instagram images and put my homepage together.

Q: How often do you update your website?

SKM: I update my website pretty often – usually when I’m on the road in an airport or a hotel. I like putting up new work as soon as I can so my clients can see new projects and new imagery.

Q: What is your favorite feature that liveBooks offers?

SKM: I absolutely love the functionality of the editSuite – it’s so easy to upload images, arrange them, tag them, etc. Also the optimization feature is especially nice when uploading, it’s a bit of a time saver for sure!

Q: What’s one piece of advice you’d offer to someone designing their website?

SKM: My best advice would be to really think about the images that you choose; you want to keep people’s attention and keep them coming back for more and the best way to do that is to have only your strongest images on your website that flow together as you look at them.

Have a website you’d like us to feature? Email us at social@livebooks.com.

Richmond, VA based award-winning photographer Rebecca D’Angelo has some incredible achievements – just one of which includes having her images of Hurricane Katrina: 10 Months After the Storm in the permanent collection of the Library of Congress. Equally impressive is her website design and chic, clean style she utilizes. We couldn’t wait to have her be our featured website this week, and we think you’ll love her site, too!

Read on and then head over to www.rebeccadangelo.com!

Q: How would you describe the aesthetic of your site in three words?

RD: Clean, Intimate, Contemporary

Q: How do you choose the photos that you display on your homepage?

RD: I have an editor, Suzanne Sease, that I usually work with every year or two and she generally picks the images and puts them in order for me. Whichever is first for each portfolio is the one that pops up on the homepage. Sometimes, if I take a new favorite and I find the time, I will switch it up myself.

Q: How often do you update your website?

RD: Not very often, unfortunately! All this technology has made life more complicated and seems to zap us of all our time. I have a sense of inertia that tends to set in. When I switched to the Scaler site, I sat on it for over a year because I knew it would be a gargantuan task to track down all my original photos and resize them. It was good, however, because I had not updated it in a while, except for a portfolio on the site titled “New Work.” I spent last summer compiling images and getting a lot more of my current work to show Suzanne, as well as some of my projects.

Q: What is your favorite feature that liveBooks offers?

RD: I joined liveBooks pretty much in the beginning. Suzanne had recommended it to me, and felt it was the best. I couldn’t agree more when I saw the sites. I was looking for something uber photographer friendly and clean that wasn’t going to eat up all my time trying to figure out. Having worked in photojournalism most of my career, and with photo-editors, I felt that the simpler and the cleaner, the better. It should be about the photographs. I do not like blogs, I don’t want to scroll down, I don’t want to be overwhelmed with too much text or imagery. Before liveBooks, I would pay someone to update my site every time I needed it done. I loved the look of liveBooks, and I love that it is easy to navigate and doesn’t try to be all fancy schmancy. The new Scaler sites are great; I love that my website has one look on my desktop and another look on my phone (one is black background, the phone is white). My favorite features are that I can link and generate spider capabilities on the Internet and I love that I can upload and change images at will, without any hassle. Also, I have two websites: www.rebeccadangelo.com which features my published editorial work and projects, and www.rebeccadangelophotography.com features my animal photography and pedestrian work. I can link the two sites in multiple ways without interfering with the look of either one. I had looked at other sites to use for my work but never found them as clean and as much of an industry standard as liveBooks. It feels much more like the book I used to drop off at magazines back in the day. I can always tell a liveBooks site, and I know that the person using it is typically a photographer of merit.

Q: What’s one piece of advice you’d offer to someone designing their website?

RD: My advice would simply be not to try to be too trendy. Keep it clean and simple. Editors look at hundreds of sites a week and if they have to work too hard to use your site, or if the first image doesn’t catch them, they are moving on.

Have a website you’d like us to feature? Email us at social@livebooks.com.

We love the way photographer Mike Henry’s website homepage opens right up to display tons of his beautiful images. The navigation is smooth, and the photos flow perfectly – which is why we chose it as our featured website this week.

Don’t forget to check out www.mikehenryphoto.com after seeing what he had to say about his site below!

Q: How would you describe the aesthetic of your website in three words?

MH: Easy Navigation and Viewing

Q: How do you choose the photos that you display on your homepage?

MH: My homepage opens up in my Lifestyle Portfolio thumbnail overview. I want to  make it as easy as possible for the viewer to quickly get a feel for my work as a whole. I know that people are busy and have short attention spans and my hope is that they see what they are looking for, without having to spend much time searching.

Q: How often do you update your website?

MH: It is in a constant state of change. I update it weekly/monthly or whenever there is new work and I am constantly editing out old images that I don’t feel are relevant to my brand.

Q: What is your favorite feature that liveBooks offers?

MH: Probably how easy it is to add images myself or its superior SEO.

Q: What’s one piece of advice yo’d offer to someone designing their website?

MH: I would say it’s important to make the images load fast and emphasize the importance of easy navigation.

Have a website you’d like us to feature? Email us at social@livebooks.com!